Finer even than the architecture and the exterior of the buildings is the church furniture in Spain. It is unsurpassed for beauty and interest. The carved and sculptured wood-work in some of the cathedrals is finer than even that of the Netherlands and of Germany. The storied screens and choir stalls at Toledo; the retablos of Gerona and Salamanca, of Avila and Seville; the choir fittings of Santiago, Zamora, and of Burgos; the lecterns and pulpits both of brass and wood; and the rails and gates and screens of noblest metal-work are often of simply grand proportion; nay, even the polychrome wooden statues in the churches will often be found to be of rarest beauty. The monuments erected to the memory of the dead are equal to anything which affection and piety have raised elsewhere, from that of Archbishop Maurice at Burgos, in the thirteenth century—of the tombs of the constable and of those of Juan II. and Isabel of Portugal, in the Cartuja de Miraflores, of the fifteenth century; and that of Prince Juan, the only son of Ferdinand and Isabella, at Avila, erected in 1497—down to the noble mausoleum of inlaid metal-work by Zuloaga, lately placed in the Church of the Atocha to the memory of Prim. In these and many more, Spain can show a sequence able to vie with that of any other land. Hardly less beautiful are the minor accessories of Catholic worship; the gold and silver smiths' work of the chandeliers, the jewelled work of crosses, custodias or shrines, and sacred vessels is often worthy of admiration. In all such works of art, before the pillage of the French in the war of liberation, and the destruction of the convents, Spain was probably one of the richest of Christian lands. If we seem to insist too much on ecclesiastical art in Spain, it is because, as we shall see still more clearly in the case of painting, art has here concentrated its choicest effort on religious subjects, and in them has won its greatest triumphs. Except, perhaps, in arms and in porcelain, in portrait-painting and in furniture, all the masterpieces of Spanish art are in some sense ecclesiastical. Take away religion from her art, how poor would be the residue, for even Arabian and Moslem art in Spain were essentially religious.
Painting.
Though Spain cannot rival some other countries, Italy for example, in the number of her great painters; though she has founded no great technical school; yet is she worthy of greatest admiration; in one or two of her artists she has attained the very highest rank. As a religious painter, especially in expressing in form and colour the heights of mystic ecstasy, Murillo stands unrivalled. As a portrait-painter of courtly grace and distinction, Velazquez has few equals. It is not in landscape, or as interpreters of the ever-varying beauty of external nature, that Spanish painters excel, but in the delineation of the human form, and especially in the rendering of those religious emotions which lead through asceticism to ecstasy. Not the glorification of merely sensuous beauty, but the triumphs of the spirit over the flesh are the conquests which they prefer to delineate.
Spanish painters may be divided among three great provinces: the Valencian, Andalusian, and Castilian schools. Of these the Andalusian, and especially the school of Seville, has produced by far the greatest artists.
The earliest specimens of Spanish painting are of the decorative kind, and are employed in subordination to architecture, to add colour to form, and to heighten and make more evident the details of sculpture in churches or convents. Much of this phase of art, in which they stand very high, they probably learned from the Moors. From these labours in churches and convents art in Spain received a religious imprint and direction which it has never lost, and from which it is only now turning in the present generation. Goya and Fortuny are perhaps the only considerable painters of Spain in whose works religious subjects do not preponderate. Spanish art reflects in a peculiar degree the characteristic of Spanish theology. The mystic grace, the transport of love which seems almost too human and tender when fixed on the Divine, which moves us in the writings of St. Teresa, St. Juan de la Cruz, Xavier, and others, touches us no less in the pictures of Murillo. Stern and sombre, as these are lovely, are the paintings which remind us that we are in the land of the inquisition. Figures of martyrs serene in tortures, whose horrors are laid bare as by no other artists, figures of saints of primitive, mediæval, or of later times, who have carried asceticism to excess, portraits of men who were as severe to themselves as they were pitiless to others; such are the subjects which are faithfully rendered by the pencils of Ribalta, Ribera, Zurbaran, and many others. Later on, when the old constitutional liberties of Spain had almost utterly fallen, and when the worship of the king had begun almost to rival that of the Blessed Virgin, Velazquez and others give us portraits of the royal family of Spain. The fun and wit which really existed in Spanish life, and which her novelists have depicted with such relish in innumerable novels, is but poorly represented in Spanish art by any of her great masters. Murillo's beggar-boys are almost the only pictures which answer to the "picaresque" side of Spanish literature till the advent of Goya and of Fortuny.
The expressions of the plastic arts of Spain are neither so idealized as the Italian, nor so intellectual as the German, nor so sensuous as the Flemish, nor so realistic as those of the Dutch school; but they are far more powerful in colouring and truer and deeper in feeling than are those of the French school. The Spaniard painted the types and characters of his native land, but he delighted to throw around them the magic lights that never were on sea or land; through the intense darkness of his asceticism ever peers a ray of heavenly light; but the type of the figure is ever Spanish; never, in the best days of art, was inspiration sought from a reproduction of the forms of pagan classical ism, or from a mere eclecticism of beauty. Though the drawing is correct, we feel that it has not been learned from a mere study of ancient statuary or from anatomical preparations, but from the living type and figure. Here and there we find painters like Juande Joannes (Vicente Macip) and Domenico Theotocopuli (El Greco), who might have lived on Italian soil; but generally the tone of Spanish painters is local and unmistakable. Through all his styles—the frio (cold), calido (warm), and the vaporoso (mystic)—Murillo remained faithful to Spanish, nay, to Andalusian models; none can mistake his saints and virgins, his boys and beggars, as belonging to any other race. He does not tell the wondrous story of the Incarnation with so grand an appeal to the intellect as do the Italian painters. The "woman blessed throughout all generations" does not look out to us from his canvas from the serene heights of perfect woman-hood which has found its crown in the mystery of the Motherhood of the Son of God, but in younger and more girlish forms he paints for us the maiden rapt in adoring ecstasy as she experiences the wonders of love divine, bathed in the golden light of a rapture which none but the very purest can ever feel, and which the very angels are represented as reverencing.
Space forbids our giving even an approximate catalogue of Spanish painters; we can merely single out for mention the two or three of highest rank in their respective provinces. In Valencia we have Ribalta (1551-1628), Juan de Joames (Vicente Macip) (1523-79), and the great but gloomy Ribera (1588-1609). To this school also belong the artists of Catalonia and of the Balearic Isles. In Castile are Navarette (El Mudo) (1526-79), Morales (1509-86), Theotocopuli (El Greco) (died 1578), and the younger Herrera (died 1686). But the greatest painters are from Andalusia and from Seville. The well-known names of Herrera the Elder (1576-1656), Zurbaran (1598-1662), Murillo (1618-82), Velazquez (1623-60), suffice to show its pre-eminence. The eighteenth century, in art as well as in literature, was a time of utter decadence; Goya (1746-1820), the caricaturist, is the only artist we need mention; but, like its literature, Spanish art is now at length rising from its long sleep. Fortuny (1838-74), has made himself a European reputation; though, through his early death, the pictures he has left give promise only of what his future might have been. Rosales (1840-73), though less known by foreigners, is of equal, if not of greater merit; like Fortuny, he died in his early prime. Madrazo, Jimenez, Fradilla, and others, though not of more than national reputation, yet prove that art is not extinct in Spain.
In what have been called the industrial arts Spain was formerly very rich, and, but for the wretched economical policy and administration of the Government since the seventeenth century, would probably have held her own against other countries. The gold and silver ornaments still worn by the peasantry in a few districts perpetuate designs and methods of workmanship originally derived from the Moors, and much of the church work is still of great excellence. No less beautiful is the iron-work, in which a grand effect is often produced by simply noble proportions in the gates, rejas, and screens of her cathedrals and churches; and in another sphere, in the manufacture of arms, and of inlaying steel or iron with arabesque patterns of gold and silver, an art which has been lately revived with great success in Biscay and the Basque Provinces. In porcelain and pottery the majolica ware, made at Valencia, was renowned throughout Europe; and the Moorish glazed and lustred ware, the manufacture of which remained a secret till the present century, is greatly sought after by amateurs. The wine-jars (tinajas and alpujarras), the porous pottery (bucaros), the azulejos or decorated tiles, continue traditions originally derived through the Arabs from the East, but which had almost expired when the manufacture was faintly revived under royal patronage in the times of Charles III., to start again on a stronger life with the aid of English capital in our own times. Spanish glass is sometimes curious, and much of the stained and painted windows in the cathedrals is excellent, especially that of Toledo and of Leon; but this art was undoubtedly learned from foreign workmen, and only became naturalized in Spain. Of carvings in wood and marble and ivory we have already sufficiently spoken. In textile fabrics and embroidery, especially in lace, Spain was formerly very rich. The mantillas of the ladies, the dresses of the sacred images, the copes of the clergy, gave full opportunity for the production of this fabric; but the chief effort is now directed to the manufacture of the best foreign laces, all of which are most successfully imitated by hand-workers in Valencia and Murcia, where they can be produced at a lower cost than is possible in colder and more northern climes. Everything in Spain, even the common use of colour and of flowers by the Andalusian peasants, shows a natural feeling for art; and its production is hindered more by indolence, and by the mischievous economical conditions of almost all Spanish industry, than by any want of talent in the native workman or artisan.
Though, perhaps, there is no country in Europe in which music is more appreciated or practised than in Spain, it is singular that she has produced no really great master. She has many composers of "zarzuelas," a species of lighter opera; her traditional dance and ballad tunes are some of the most inspiriting possible; and her guitar playing is renowned, but more for the romantic sentiment of the words and the occasion on which it is used than for the music itself. Well-nigh the only name for which even Spaniards claim equality with the great European masters in serious music is that of Don Manuel Doyague, of Salamanca (1755-1842). His Miserere, Te Deum, and various Masses are said to equal those of any master of his time.